In the field of first responder's emergency communications, especially when used by police departments, fire departments and emergency management personnel, when an incident occurs and the first responders converge on the scene of an incident, as is oftentimes the case, communication units carried by the first responders are so dissimilar that it is impossible to establish communication between all of the first responders at the scene. Moreover, in terms of homeland security, the first responder's communication units are incompatible from those used by various government departments such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense, as well as any commercial off-the-shelf equipment such as cell phones used, for instance, in public communications.
When multiple agencies arrive on the scene of an incident, there is virtually no ability to locally communicate between the various agencies regardless of any homeland security structure due to the complete lack of interoperability between the communication units used by the various agencies. What happens at the scene of an incident is the complete inability of the various agencies to talk to each other or to understand what is going on at the scene, much less to receive instructions as to what to do.
For instance, frequency channels and bands allocated for a local police department are different from those allocated to the fire department, or indeed to the emergency rescue teams. Not only are different frequencies allocated for different local modules, but also the modulation and protocols vary substantially from one communication unit to the next. For instance, much of the equipment may use analog radio channels, whereas more sophisticated equipment uses digital air interfaces. Thus, the problem of having the individual communication units communicate with other communication units is an almost insurmountable problem.
What most of the independent departments or agencies have are communication units that establish a communication link between the particular agency first responders and the agency's dispatcher over a closed network having a base station oftentimes removed from the incident location. Sometimes it is impossible for communication units on the scene to communicate with their command structure through the base station tower due to range or interference conditions, even if all the personnel from the same agency can communicate with each other over an incident area network.
The result is that when various agencies or communication units arrive at the scene of an incident, the only way that interoperable communications can be established is by either handing out communication units that interoperate to the responders at the scene so that they can communicate with each other, or a specialized van or truck is wheeled up to operate as a local switch or gateway. The logistics of this solution greatly limits the effectiveness and ability to interoperate.
The problem of providing an entire new set of communication units for each incident is cost, operator familiarity with the communication units, network capacity, and deployment time. By all accounts the handing out of new communication units at a scene is too costly. Also the transportation and setup of such large amounts of equipment to one particular spot for a given incident presents other limitations and accessibility issues. Moreover, the problem of having a specialized van or truck is that a large geographic region may have only one or two such vans available. It may take quite some time for the van and equipment to get to the scene of the incident. The equipment on the van may not be compatible with the existing radios at the scene and it may take quite some time to be able to establish interoperability with the available communication units at the scene.
Thus, the problem, in general, is to be able to provide interoperability at a local scene and to make the operations seamless to the operator so that it becomes an everyday event for personnel involved. The system must not involve anything of a specialized nature that requires an individual to learn how to use the equipment. Most importantly, the interoperability solution must be an everyday event that is automatically configured and deployed and not require specialized vehicles or equipment or specialized support personnel at the scene of incident.